Friday, March 30, 2018

Fewer Tatarstan Voters Took Part in 2018 Election than in 2012, and Fewer Voted for Putin, Analysis Shows

Paul
Goble

Staunton, March 30 – Because participation
and support for Vladimir Putin in Tatarstan were relatively high this year and
because republic officials have every reason to stress that rather than
anything else, few have pointed out that 113,172 fewer Tatarstan residents
voted for the Kremlin leader this time than did six years ago.

Putin lost 18,000 supporters in
Kazan, 16,000 in Zelenodolsk, and 12,000 in Almetyevsk; and in an indication that
this reflected a real change in the president’s support, the falloff was greatest
in polling places with electronic voting machines where falsification was more
difficult, according to Radio Svoboda’s Tatar-Bashkir Service (idelreal.org/a/29132435.html).

In Kazan precincts with electronic
voting machines, the service reports, Putin garnered only 68 percent of all
voters, “that is, less than in Moscow and St. Petersburg.” Much of the decline
in support for Putin reflected a decline in the number of Tatarstan residents
who took part in the voting. That figure was down this year by 120,000 compared
to 2012.

Tatarstan was not the only place
where the number of Putin voters declined. It was also the case in many other non-Russian
republics: In Mordvinia, there were 99,935 fewer Putin voters; in Daghestan,
27,439; in Sakha, 23,767; and even in Chechnya, 17.772 fewer than in the election
of 2012 despite a growth in the total number of those qualified to vote in all
of them.

“It is not excluded that the real
number of votes for president in the republic could have been still fewer than
reported by the regional election authorities,” given that they were lower almost
everywhere where there were voting machines – exclusively in the cities -- than
where there were not – in rural areas where observers were fewer and falsification
possibilities greater.

Thus, for example, if one considers
the precincts in Kazan with voting machines, Putin received only 67.6 percent
of the vote while in the city as a whole he got 75.9 percent. (And his real as
opposed to expressed support undoubtedly was lower still: one expert says
Tatars voted for Putin to not undercut Kazan’s leaders (idelreal.org/a/rafael-khakimov-interview/29130429.html).

The Radio Svoboda
report notes that there was one precinct with machine voting where the result
was just the opposite. In Leninogorsk, those in that precinct reportedly gave
Putin 98.9 percent of their votes, a highly improbable result even in places
like Chechnya let alone Tatarstan.